Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century

ISBN13: 9781595588340Release Date: September 4th 2012Published by: The New PressPages:400

Fatal Invention is a provocative analysis” (Nature) of race, science, and politics by leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts. It examines how the archaic belief system underlying the concept of race—revived by purportedly cutting-edge science—undermines a just society and promotes continuing inequality.

Alarming but not alarmist, controversial but evidential, impassioned but rational” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), Fatal Invention exposes the falseness of the biological concept of race—used in the past to divide humans and justify prejudice and used today to enable everything from the race-targeted therapies developed in the pharmaceutical industry and stop-and-frisks that disproportionately target African Americans to a proliferation of for-profit ancestry-testing services.

Called vitally important” and a massive achievement” by Race and the Law, Fatal Invention devastatingly counters any argument that can be made for a racial view of genetics” (The Brooklyn Rail).